


Tumblr Fic: Various

by AlchemyAlice



Series: Fic Fragments of Doom [3]
Category: Hockey RPF, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Comment Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-07-25 12:06:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7532140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fic rescued from tumblr, the leftovers!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. changing times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Prompt -> elderly Napollya :) (maybe something about gay marriage/civil unions being legalized but idc!)

The day it’s legalized in the state of New York, Napoleon considers retirement. 

Then, of course, a call comes in from Berlin HQ and as soon as he picks up the phone he says, “No, Teller.”

“Oh, come _on,_ ” Gaby says, as caustic as ever. “You should have packed it in years ago, your knees alone can’t take another state of emergency–”

“I’m at a _desk_ ,” Napoleon says. “We both are.”

“In separate rooms!” Gaby says, outraged. “You should be at home, in your _shared_  apartment, reading the paper in print and complaining about Occupy Wall Street–”

“I’d like to point out how we were instrumental in making sure that movement continued even after the media lost interest–” Napoleon interjects.

“–and you should be spoiling your cat and letting your underlings have a go already! You have no excuse anymore to continue avoiding your goddamn fairy tale ending, Solo, so help me.” 

“I’m fairly certain most fairy tales have a lower body count,” Napoleon says, after a pause.

“You clearly haven’t been reading the originals,” Gaby retorts. Then she softens. “Solo. Napoleon. Come on.”

“What difference does it make at this point, anyway?” Napoleon muses. “As you say–we live together, and excuse you, Calliope is _exceedingly_ spoiled already.”

“Don’t I get a say?” Illya says from the doorway.

“Is that Illya?” Gaby demands through the phone. “Put him on, I want to talk to him.”

Napoleon hangs up on her.Rubs his knee absently and then smooths back his hair, gone mostly gray now. He’s grateful, at least, that it’s stayed reasonably thick. He looks at Illya. “I thought you already made your opinion clear,” he says.

Illya leans against the door frame. He’s developed a very slight stoop, mostly from slumping over laboratory desks for the past decade or so. Even so, he remains inordinately tall, and manages to scare the rest of R&D into shape on a weekly basis. Napoleon sometimes lingers around the lab for extended periods just to watch him make demands of new recruits a quarter of his age, who scuttle like ants to obey. It’s a fantastic spectacle.

“I made myself clear on civil unions,” he says. His accent is very nearly gone now, after so many years in the States, and a great deal of practice adopting the accents of nearly ten major world languages. “Marriage, on the other hand, I may have one or two thoughts on.”

Napoleon sits back in his chair. “Oh?”

Illya lopes over to the desk and sits on it’s edge, long legs crossing at the ankles. He regards Napoleon warmly. “Civil unions were important, but not important for us,” he says. “We’ve already put into our UNCLE contracts all of the medical and legal ties we could ever need to protect each other in case anything happened. Marriage is…symbolic. Sanctified.”

“You’re an atheist,” Napoleon points out. “So am I.”

Illya rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

Napoleon cocks his head. Illya waits. 

“I’m not retiring,” he says, “Not until Ming can show me she can handle it.”

“Do as you like,” Illya sniffs.

“And I’m not kneeling,” Napoleon says, after a second. “I don’t think I could get up again.“

“Why do you think I’m standing while you’re still sitting down?” Illya replies. He crosses his arms in challenge. “Ask me, Cowboy.”

Napoleon laughs, and does as he’s told.


	2. set, match

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For wearbearbearbar's prompt: "So my weaknesses are "platonic bed sharing while mutually pining," "grumpy and antagonistic forced into prolonged contact and grudgingly come to like each other," and "person A's family basically adopts person B or B+C." If any of those appeal? "

Ultimately, Illya blames the chess set. The chess set, and also Waverly’s insistence on extended reconaissance.

“Better safe than sorry,” he says, on multiple occasions, and Illya is quite sure this is a direct response to Gaby’s tendency to run headlong into danger. Illya knows precisely how to be just careful enough. Napoleon, even, has some modicum of self-preservation instincts, though Illya is loath to admit it. 

This is…obviously beside the point. 

The point is, he blames chess and Waverly.

“You keep frowning like that and it’ll stick,” Napoleon says, sitting down across from him in the tiny Norwegian shack. Gaby is drinking wine on the kitchen table and reading a car magazine she dredged from the attached garage. Illya is trying very hard to remember the intricacies of Botvinnik vs Capablanca and is getting stuck on–

“King to G8,” Napoleon supplies.

Illya glares at him. “I knew that.”

“I’m sure you did.I prefer the Nottingham match.”

Illya narrows his eyes. “It was tie.”

Napoleon smiles. “I like ties.” 

There’s a double meaning there that Illya doesn’t like. Still, he’s having trouble concentrating, and maybe this will make Napoleon stop fidgeting. “You play?”

“Haven’t had the occasion in a while,” Napoleon says, breezy. “Might be rusty.”

Illya senses a ruse. He’s also confident that he will still win. “Take white, then.”

***

Napoleon is an _infuriating_  chess player.

It isn’t that he’s good–though he is–it’s that he’s… _whimsical._

“Why would you…?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Napoleon replies. 

“I can take your queen now,” Illya says.

“So you can. Are you going to?”

Illya is…curious. “No. I want to know what you have in mind.”

Napoleon smiles. “Good.”

In the end, Illya wins. But not without some truly spectacular losses. 

***

In Leningrad, they play again. Napoleon tricks him into a trap he should have seen coming, and Illya has to take a walk around the block to keep from wrecking the safehouse. Then he comes back. “Rematch,” he demands. “You distracted me.”

“With what, precisely?” Napoleon says, his hands splayed open.

Illya shakes his head, and rearranges the pieces. 

“You’re giving me white again?” Napoleon asks in surprise. 

“Make your move, Cowboy.”

***

They play in Talafofo, Havana, Seoul. Illya wins most of the time. Napoleon seems to take this with aplomb.

In Lucena, under the orange trees, Illya forces him into a zugzwang and Napoleon breathes, “Fuck. That’s _gorgeous,”_ and suddenly, Illya is flushed and doesn’t know why.

Napoleon doesn’t notice, he’s demanding that Illya back up three moves so he can see how it worked. 

Illya begins to comply, but then Gaby calls them over to look at a terrain map, and so they pack away the pieces instead.

“I’ll show you later,” Illya mutters.

“Please do,” Napoleon says. It’s strange to hear him sound so genuine.

As they walk back across the field, dodging split open fruit, rotting and half-devoured on the ground, Illya’s gaze gets caught on the solid movement of Napoleon’s back muscles through his thin linen shirt, and suddenly thinks, _Oh no._


	3. detente

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> XMFC, post-beach

Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures. But then again, who’s to be the judge of what’s extraordinary anymore?

Charles won’t claim to know. He isn’t claiming to know much of anything at the moment, actually, except just how glad he is to be alive. 

He looks blearily up at Erik, who is glaring down at him like he’s just gone and done the stupidest thing he’d ever seen. “This wasn’t part of our agreement,” he croaks.

“No,” Erik agrees, his voice an almost subsonic growl. “It really wasn’t.”

_Before:_

There are simple, unspoken rules of combat between them that they come to out of sheer, desperate necessity.

One confrontation in, and Angel takes her revenge on Alex with a gob of acid that tears open the backs of his legs in a way that has him crying out in agony despite himself, collapsing onto buckling linoleum. 

None of the others can reach him, fleeing out the other side of the government facility, and the roof is caving in. Hank is making a go of it, but if he doesn’t stop he’s going to get himself killed.

Raven is the one who hesitates. 

Erik is the one who acts. 

Throwing up a section of rebar above his head for support, he runs forward into the wreckage and tosses Alex up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and sprints out as everything collapses behind him.

Emma is looking at him like she needs to reassess his abilities as a leader. Angel looks vaguely disgusted, but also vaguely guilty. Erik ignores them.

“Give him to Hank, the blue one. Xavier’s group is all on the other side of the building,” he says to Azazel.

Bemused, Azazel obeys. They scram before the X-Men even get a chance to react.

Three days later, Raven receives a note in the mail, unmarked. Expensive paper with ‘Thank you’ written in neat script on one side. 

She hands the card to Erik. “Thanks,” she echoes quietly.

Emma sniffs in disapproval. 

The rule sticks: Take care of the children—at least the ones that had, for a brief time, belonged to them both.

Rule two? New recruits get the final say which way they go.

This one doesn’t even need emergency negotiation. In front of an ordinary suburban house in Cleveland, Charles lowers himself out of his car just as Erik steps out of his. They stop at the front gate and look at each other.

It’s the first time they’ve seen each other after Cuba. Erik takes one look at Charles and sinks, very deliberately, to his knees. 

Charles just watches him, hands tight on the wheels of his chair. Alex sticks his head out of the car behind him. “Professor? Need any help?”

Charles shakes his head. “No, thank you.” He doesn’t break contact with Erik. “We state our cases,” he says quietly, “And then she decides.”

Erik’s jaw tightens, and then eases, his eyes unreadable. He isn’t wearing the helmet, though, and that’s enough. After a moment, he nods.

Twenty minutes later, twelve-year-old Jean Grey looks between them both, eyes solemn and too old for her face, and says hesitantly, “I think I’d like to go to school.”

Charles is gracious enough not to gloat. Instead, he hands her a pamphlet to show to her parents, and says, “We’d be very happy to have you.”

When they walk out to their respective cars, Erik says, “You’ll need to be careful with that one.”

Charles promises, “I will.” And then, after a pause, “It was good to see you.”

Erik opens his car door with a flick of his fingers. “And you, Charles. Take care.”

Later, a sullen teenaged boy shows up at the Hellfire Club with a rucksack and a look in his eye that Erik recognizes from his own youth. Rage, and fear, and bitterness.

“A guy named Xavier told me to ask for Magneto?” the kid says, looking around at the opulence of the club with an affected air of unimpressed skepticism. “What the fuck’s a Magneto?”

Erik snorts quietly, and steps forward to introduce himself.

There are other rules, other agreements. To minimize casualties (occasionally, when Erik is feeling charitable, of the innocent bystander variety as well), and to establish quickly whether a situation calls for conflict or for the X-Men to simply stand aside.

The latter circumstances are few and far between, but occasionally the government will do something so systematically monstrous that Erik telegraphs from miles away what he’s about to do and why, and when the time comes to take action…

Well.

“The prof says hi,” Logan says, arms crossed, leaning on his bike.

Erik raises an eyebrow as he exits the plane, Mystique and the others behind him. “Oh?”

“‘Do try not to make too much of a mess, Erik, darling’,” Logan parrots in a horrendous posh accent.

“Something tells me that isn’t a direct quote,” Mystique says drily.

Logan shrugs. “Close enough.”

Erik manages a slight smile. “Will you be joining us on our expedition, then?”

Logan’s nostrils flare. He jerks his head at the bunker at the bottom of the ravine. “Was here for a couple of months before, I think. Memory of it’s still FUBAR, but me and the prof think it’s a pretty sure thing. So yeah, I’m with you for this one.”

They make a mess.

“Don’t think he’ll mind, really,” Mystique says, as they walk away. 

Logan grunts. In his arms is a young boy, unmoving except for one of his hands, which is clutched around Logan’s jacket. There are scars all up and down his arms, and in long curving patterns along his bald head. Logan holds him like a newborn.

Mystique herself has an older girl in tow, who looks in satisfied hatred at the ruin in the valley.

“I think we’ll all come away from this experience richer,” Magneto says, with a shade of irony.

“Hmph,” Logan says again. 

They part ways as amicably as they can. 

_Now:_

This is different, so different, though. 

Charles _hurts._

“Keep it together, damn you,” Raven says, blue hands rough on pressure points, staunching bloodflow with the kindness of a sibling and the callousness of a soldier. Panic is thrumming all the way through her like electrical current, and it keeps Charles’ adrenaline rushing.

“I am as together as I can manage,” Charles says through gritted teeth.

“Don’t. Speak.”

 _How else am I to communicate with you?_ he says fiercely, breaking the promise he’d kept for more than ten years.

“Exactly like that,” she responds, at once savage and vulnerable. “Keep talking, however you can.”

 _Jesus fucking Christ,_ Charles manages between shallow breaths.

“Exactly,” Erik says from somewhere, Charles can’t tell, “Keep fighting, Charles.”

He does, cursing and shouting all the way. 

In this way, they all end up at home.

Jean looks solemnly at Erik when he enters the foyer, now a few years older and far too perceptive for her own good. 

“What you’re about to say, darling?” Emma says from behind Erik, “Don’t.“

Jean narrows her eyes at her, and then blinks. Then she looks back at Erik with all too much understanding. “It’s nice to see you again,” she says politely.

“What did you say to her?” Erik asks Emma.

“Nothing untoward,” Emma says. “Now get your charge to the infirmary.” She turns to Jean. “Would you like some hot chocolate? I think I would, but I don’t know where the kitchen is.”

Jean nods slowly, and begins to trot off deeper into the manor. “I’ll show you.”

Emma casts a last glance at Erik, and follows behind her.

Erik sketches a nod to Jean, and flicks his fingers. The stretcher Charles is prone on floats behind him.

“Infirmary’s this way,” Alex says curtly, nodding to Mystique. “Down where the servant’s quarters used to be.”

“Right,” Mystique says. “How can we help?”

“You already have,” Alex say honestly, “But if you want to stay with him, you can.”

“We’d like that,” Erik says.

They stay the night. And then the day following.

“We’re going to have to go eventually,” Emma points out, as merciless as ever.

“Yes,” Erik agrees. “But not for forever.”

 _That’s all I ask,_ Charles says faintly, from the other side of the house. His healing is slow, but it’s happening all the same.

Erik doesn’t suppress the thrum of warmth he echoes back, curling from somewhere beneath his breastbone back to Charles, even when Emma’s nose twitches in distaste.

It won’t ever be easy. But they can always make some new rules as they go along. 


	4. bridges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a prompt by quidam9, who asked: "Now that I know you're a hockey fan I CAN'T NOT. Pacific Rim AU or fusion, your choice of players?"

“You’ve just gotta keep trying,” Duper shrugs. “Your brain is an ever-changing thing, who knows when the connection’s gonna come back?”

“If,” Sid says, because he has to, but also because he might be starting to believe it. “Also, that’s a really scientific explanation you have there.”

“Plenty of people have drifted after concussions. It’s practically in the job description.”

“Not like this,” Sid replies. “We wear helmets for a bunch of reasons, you know.” Not the least of them being that after Tartaran, and Sid losing his ability to drift, pilots started taking more interest in the engineering of their drivesuits.

“Yeah, speaking of which,” Duper tosses him a pons headset. “You’re late for your appointment. New guy, import from Russia.”

Sid groans. “I’m not going to try for a drift with a Russian, they have a totally different view of boundaries.”

“ _Ovechkin_ has a different view, which is to say he believes they don’t exist,” Duper says dryly. “God forbid he’s your basis for judging all Russians. The Kaidonovskys do fine.”

“Because they’re with _each other._ All right, fine, fine,” Sid grumbles, and puts the helmet under his arm. “Let’s go.”

The new guy is…tall. “Hi,” he says, putting out his hand immediately as Sid enters the lab. “Sidney Crosby?”

“That’s me,” Sid says. 

“This is Evgeni Malkin,” Flower says from where he’s setting up the pons. “He’ll be testing your drift levels today.”

“Why’d you come out here?” Sid asks. “I hear there’s a lot of action at the Korsakov ‘dome.”

“Hear Sidney Crosby lose drift, lose partner to new jaeger,” Evgeni says, “I think, maybe can help?”

“Malkin has a very particular drift pattern,” Flower supplies, before Sid can cut in to defend Jack. Jack hadn’t wanted to find a new partner, but Sid had sent him off. He was doing good work Los Angeles, and Sid only regretted it on off days. “When we were searching for compatibles, especially ones that might not do any further damage to your neural pathways, he came up.”

“Also, want to be in Canada,” Evgeni says, his smile a little conspiratorial as he leans towards Sid. “Like the jaegers here.”

“They’re the best,” Sid says automatically. He suddenly realises he hasn’t let go of Evgeni’s hand. Evgeni’s grip is firm, steady. 

“Come on, let’s get you set up,” Flower says, eyeballing them.

Evgeni finally lets go of Sid’s hand. “Ready?” he asks.

And Sid…suddenly has a good feeling about this. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “See you in the drift.”

Evgeni grins.


End file.
